


the fear that never leaves you

by ObscureReference



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Childhood Memories, Children, Hurt/Comfort, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Nightmares, Parenthood, Risen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-02 17:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17268737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObscureReference/pseuds/ObscureReference
Summary: He beamed under his mother’s praise. The sun was bright, and the sky was crystal clear. It was a lovely day by all regards. Inigo felt a bit like he was underwater. From happiness, probably.His mother said, “Now let’s see if we can try that all together. First—”A noise rang out behind them. A strange groan.





	the fear that never leaves you

**Author's Note:**

> "Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past. None of this is true. [...] The very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge." - Jonah Lehrer, Wired
> 
> No actual violence is literally depicted in this fic, but the fear/thought of specific violence is present! Mild by my personal standards, but be aware! Also a description of a Risen, which is literally a zombie, is present but that is also brief. The fear leading up to seeing it is not, however. Be aware!
> 
> Happy New Year!

“Arms up!”

Inigo stretched out his arms and struggled to balance on one foot. He wobbled but didn’t fall. His mother beamed down at him, striking her own perfect pose. Inigo ached to match her.

“Very good, honey,” she cooed. “Just like that. Hold it if you can. Okay, now try this.”

She switched poses. Inigo tried his best to copy her.

“Great!”

He beamed under his mother’s praise. The sun was bright, and the sky was crystal clear. It was a lovely day by all regards. Inigo felt a bit like he was underwater. From happiness, probably.

His mother said, “Now let’s see if we can try that all together. First—”

A noise rang out behind them. A strange groan.

Inigo turned, startled. The front door to their house stood wide open. Light poured in through the doorway and the windows, illuminating the front room. Strangely, the room appeared more gray than it should have despite the sunlight.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” His mother rested her hand on his shoulder and turned him back around. Inigo didn't quite feel the weight of her touch. “Pay attention to this now, or else you won’t be able to do the dance right later. Or do you want to stop?”

“No!” Inigo protested, forgetting all about the sounds. “I want to learn! I can do it!”

His mother’s smile was beautiful. “Alright then. Try this.”

Inigo wanted to dance, he really did, but there was another sound from behind them then. He turned for a second time. Nothing had changed in the scenery behind them. Or had it?

He frowned, mood dropping. Did the house look darker than before?

“Inigo?”

He looked up.

“I don’t think you’re taking this very seriously,” his mother said gently.

Inigo’s heart leapt. “No, I am! I’m sorry!”

His mother laughed, but this time Inigo wasn’t very happy to hear the sound. She reached down for him. Inigo's vision twisted. Blue turned gray, grass turned to wood. Inigo blinked and realized it was night time now. He was in his pajamas.

And they weren’t in the front yard anymore. He was alone in the kitchen. A cup full of water sat half-full in hand, but Inigo’s mouth still felt dry.

There came a thump from the basement.

He set the cup on the counter without thinking, turning to face the hallway. There was no more sunlight. It was nighttime. Obviously. Inigo didn’t remember when it had gotten so dark, but that information didn’t seem as important on finding out what that noise had been.

“Mom?” he called out. His voice came out as a rasp. “Dad?”

He tried to call out to his parents again—louder this time—but all that left his throat was a dry whisper. Something rustled behind the basement door. He clamped his lips shut.

The hallway was abysmally dark. So dark he didn’t know how he could possibly see the door to the basement at all. But he could. The darkness around the door slithered like a living thing, but Inigo found himself taking one creaking step at a time toward the basement anyway. His voice caught in his throat like a hummingbird.

Something in the basement _thumped_ again. Whatever moved, it sounded big. Looming. Inigo’s heart thudded in his chest. He tried to look back towards the safety of the kitchen, but his neck wouldn’t budge. His feet moved without thought or care, and with every cruel step, the door to the basement loomed closer.

Then, halfway down the hall, the door opened. Not a lot. Not all the way.

But it hadn’t been Inigo who opened it.

He tried to freeze, to jump back at what must have been magic, but again, his feet didn’t listen to him. They kept moving ever forward. The thumping, which had slowly begun to resemble a heartbeat, melded with wet snarls as Inigo’s fingers curled around the door.

He was half convinced something was going to snap his fingers off before he threw the door open. But nothing did. That still wasn’t a comforting.

While the basement door opened without incident, it welcomed him like the maw of a beast. Only darkness— _deeper_ darkness, impenetrable darkness—lay on the other side of the door. A wooden staircase led deeper into house.

His body moved forward without his permission.

 _Stop,_ Inigo tried to scream through his unyielding vocal cords. _No, no, I don’t want to go in there!_

He knew, without a doubt, there was something awful waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.

The top step creaked under Inigo’s meager weight. He imagined a creature with claws or a killer with a butcher knife slicing at the back of his heels as he descended the staircase. His eyes were glued to the bottom of the steps, to the darkness that awaited him at the bottom. He was waiting for something awful to emerge from it. Something he couldn’t unsee.

Inigo walked down the stairs for what felt like a lifetime. At some point, he knew without looking that the entrance at the top of the stairs was no longer visible. Not that his body allowed him to look. It forced him to go down, down, down, into the dark.

Rattling sounds joined the thumping and the snarls. Metal jingled. Inigo couldn’t imagine what kind monster lived under his house that could make all those noises, but he knew it wasn’t a pleasant one.

He was small and alone and his heart beat so rapidly it felt like it had stopped altogether. Every subsequent step into the basement brought a fresh wave of horror with it. The very air around his limbs was alive with chill.

Then, as sudden as it was agonizing, his bare feet touched the basement floor.

He stopped. He couldn’t race back up the stairs like he wanted, but he didn’t move forward again either.

The rattling, the snarling, the _thumpthumpthump_ of the creature’s feet and Inigo’s heart—it was all louder than it had ever been.

Where were his parents?

Inigo went to cry and found he couldn’t even form the tears.

Something was down here with him in the dark. He knew that. He couldn’t see it, and he didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to lay eyes on the creature that so badly wanted to see _him_ , to hunt him, to snap him up in its jaws—

Out of nowhere, a candle sprang to life.

Inigo stared into the fluttering orange light, utterly paralyzed.

The monster’s form flickered in the dull flame.

Rotten air left its equally rotten mouth in a breathy screech. The monster shaped like a human lunged for Inigo, but the chain tied around its neck bit into its flesh and snapped the creature back against the wall. The chain rattled with the movement; it was the same rattling sounds Inigo had heard at the top of the stairs.

 _This_ was the thing living under his house. A shambling mockery of a person.

He trembled.

 _Mom_! his heart cried. _Dad!_

The monster gnashed its teeth at Inigo and made sickening sounds. Inigo internally screamed at himself to _move_ , to _go,_ to call for his parents.

It was all pointless. He couldn’t move an inch.

But the monster could. It was strong. It had killed dozens of strong, heroic men before, and it was going to crush a little twig of a boy like Inigo with one hand. Then it was going to eat him. Inigo knew this the same way he knew the sky was blue and grass was green. Except this knowledge terrified him.

It strained against the chain again, and this time the metal _snapped_.

The creature lunged for him. Inigo tried one last time to move, to scamper back up the stairs, but he couldn’t. The monster darted toward him with raised hands to grab Inigo by the neck, to bash his head into the floor, to, to, to—

It lunged—

Inigo opened his mouth in a soundless scream—

 

 

 

_“Dad?”_

Laslow's eyes snapped open.

A more familiar darkness swam in his vision. Something soft gave way under his hands as he pushed himself up on his forearms. He was laying on his stomach, thrown prone there by the Risen, and another version of himself stood in the doorway, barefoot—

“Dad?” a small voice whimpered again.

Laslow squinted. He breathed out.

It was only Soleil.

“Hey,” he said softly. He cleared his throat before continuing. “What’s wrong? Can’t sleep?”

Soleil’s head bobbed up and down. She darted from the doorway, clambering onto the bed and under the arm Laslow raised to welcome her. Laslow pushed himself backwards to make room, pressing his own back further against Xander’s front, but Soleil followed the movement like a sunflower following the light. She pressed her face to his shoulder.

Laslow put his arm around his daughter and pulled her close. She felt so small, he thought. He silently chided himself for ever being afraid of her shadowy figure in the doorway, even for a moment. He chided himself even as the sweat on the back of his neck was still cooling.

“Did you have a bad dream?” he whispered into the dark. Xander was still sleeping soundly behind him. It was better if at least one of them made it through the night.

Soleil didn’t say anything for a moment. Laslow wondered if she’d fallen asleep already.

“Soleil?” he tried again.

“…Maybe,” Soleil admitted.

Laslow sighed into her hair and rubbed soft circles into her back. She wasn’t crying, which was a good sign, but no matter how sunny Soleil acted most of the time, nightmares still felt terrible when you were young.

And maybe not only then, he thought.

“That’s alright,” he said quietly. “You can sleep with me and your father then. We’ll keep the bad dreams away. Does that sound good?”

Soleil nodded against his shoulder. Laslow breathed out into her hair.

“Alright then,” he agreed. “Let’s get some sleep.”

He laid there a while, waiting to see if Soleil had anything more to say, but when her breathing evened out he figured they could discuss her bad dreams in the morning. If she even remembered them by then. It wasn’t often Soleil had nightmares in the first place, and even rarer that they didn’t slip from her memory like water off a duck. She’d surprisingly grown out of sleeping with her parents faster than Siegbert had.

In the silence, Laslow tried to recall his own dream. It had been a memory mixed with fear. Fear as a result of events that had happened, of course, but also fear for what _could_ have happened. The dream was as much a memory as it was his own brain warping the past.

There really had been a Risen in the house that night, he remembered. That truly had happened. And it really had been locked in the basement that Laslow’s father had made especially for practicing his magic where little ones like Laslow couldn’t get too curious and hurt themselves.

But the Risen hadn’t been chained to the wall by its neck like a feral animal. It had been securely strapped to a table with leather belts. The straps were so tight the Risen couldn’t so much as wiggle. And they hadn’t broken either; the Risen had huffed and strained when it saw Inigo, following Inigo’s movement with his eyes because those were the only things it _could_ move, but Inigo had never been in any real danger. Not even for a moment.

He’d frozen at the sight of the creature and screamed all the same. His parents had both come thudding down the basement stairs at the sound. It had probably taken mere seconds, though it had felt longer in Inigo's terrified mind. His mother had scooped him up from the floor and spirited him back to the living room before he could even blink. She’d given him a quick scolding about never going downstairs or anywhere mommy and daddy said not to go, and then she’d spent the rest of the evening comforting his frightened sobs.

Laslow didn’t remember much of what else had happened that day. But he remembered the fear that hadn’t left him for a long, long time afterwards. The knowledge that monsters weren’t far away, that they sometimes lived under his house—that sometimes his parents had no idea, and sometimes, more terribly, the _did_ know and yet did nothing—had been startling and inerasable.

He’d laid awake in bed that night and listened to his mother yell at his father for the first and only time in his memory. Even Inigo, young as he'd been, had been able to connect the dots that Olivia hadn’t had any idea about the Risen in the basement either. Only Henry had known. Henry had  _brought_ the beast down there. Inigo's mother sure had some things to say about that.

The yelling hadn’t lasted long. Olivia’s anger quickly melted away as she burst into tears.

Henry never raised his voice or defended himself. Inigo listened to the shuffling of feet, to Henry’s sorry explanations. How Henry had brought the Risen into the house because he wanted to study it— _to protect you and Inigo_ , Henry had whispered. How he’d taken every precaution, how he hadn’t wanted them to be frightened in their own home, and so he hadn’t said anything. How the door to the basement was always closed, the Risen was secure, he didn’t think Inigo would go down there, and _I’m so sorry, Olivia._

His mother had cried all through his father’s apologies.

Henry apologized to Inigo that next morning as well. Paler than usual and shamefaced instead of smiling, he told Inigo about how sorry he was, that Inigo was safe in their house, that he had no reason to be afraid of anything so long as his parents were around.

 _“I only want to protect you,”_ Henry whispered into Inigo’s hair, hugging him tightly while his son shook. _“But I did it wrong, and I’m so sorry for that. I love you and your mother so much.”_

Inigo hadn’t understood then.

Laslow understood now, belatedly. He understood that his father really had been trying his best, that he’d only made a mistake with the best of intentions. Laslow was fumbling through that now with Soleil and Siegbert. He wanted them to live long, happy lives, but he was sure there were things he and Xander were doing wrong now that would come back to bite them later. Things that they wouldn’t even realize they were doing wrong until the harm had already been done.

So he understood Henry’s intentions. He did. And if he been older or if Olivia had also known what Henry was up to, maybe things would have gone differently.

That hadn’t made the way he slept in his parent’s bed for the next two months and cried every time he found himself alone any easier, of course. But Laslow at least understood what his father had been trying to do the way he hadn’t understood at age five. Or however old he’d been then.

Time and distance had warped the memory. It had already begun warping itself the moment Inigo had been whisked back upstairs, out of that basement.

He couldn’t even say why he’d investigated the basement that day. Maybe he really had heard some strange sounds. Maybe he’d gone downstairs out of childish curiosity, spurned by nothing. Inigo had not been an investigative child, but anything was possible.

It hadn’t even been the middle of the night when Inigo had discovered the Risen. It had been sometime in the morning. There had been sunlight in the windows. Laslow remembered that now.

There was a lot Laslow remembered now—or _thought_ he remembered, at least—that Inigo hadn’t understood at the time. There was also a lot he’d forgotten. A lot he’d changed without meaning to change it.

But Inigo was gone, and only Laslow was left to recall things like that.

Even so, it seemed some memories never really faded—no matter how altered or amplified they became.

Some indeterminable amount of time passed with Laslow staring at the back of his own eyelids in a fruitless effort to fall asleep before he felt Xander shift against his back.

“Are you awake?” Xander whispered, nigh soundlessly. Laslow wouldn’t have heard it had he been asleep.

He made an acknowledging sound in the back of his throat. He kept his eyes closed.

“You’re tense.”

Was he? Laslow didn’t feel how tense he was until he deliberately relaxed. His muscles instantly thanked him. He made the same acknowledging sound and felt Xander’s arm shift around his waist.

“Bad dreams?” Xander asked.

Laslow’s lips twitched.

“Maybe,” he whispered back, mimicking Soleil. He felt Xander’s breath on the back of his neck.

He didn’t ask why Xander—a notorious restless sleeper—was awake at this hour. He just hoped they both had some more time before the morning sun rose.

Part of Laslow wanted to turn over and bury his face into Xander’s chest the way Soleil had buried her face into his, but that movement would have required waking their daughter, so he didn’t. Part of Laslow also liked keeping his back to Xander and knowing he had eyes on the door at any given moment, so the urge to flip around was one he squashed rather quickly.

Still, the feeling of Xander’s skin against his was one he savored.

Laslow had eyes on the door, his daughter in his arms, and his husband at his back. He was safe here. Soleil was safe here. Xander was safe. Siegbert, sleeping soundly in his bedroom as he did every night, was also safe. They were all fine.

“Rest,” Xander rumbled into his ear. He didn’t ask what Laslow had dreamed about, of course. Sleep was the most important thing at the moment. Talk could come later. “Get some more sleep if you can. Nothing will touch you here.”

Ever so smoothly, Laslow lifted the arm he had laid around Soleil and laid his hand on top of Xander’s instead. He gently squeezed Xander’s fingers. Xander didn’t make a sound, but Laslow knew he felt it. He flexed his hand across Laslow's stomach.

Laslow curled tighter around Soleil, and in turn, Xander curled more around him.

Eventually, Laslow slept on—dreamless.

**Author's Note:**

> The imagery of Laslow's nightmare has been a scene that has stuck with me for a long time. I originally conceived of it as way less dream-like and more of a straight up horror fic, but the chance for me to write that scene has never occurred until now. So I adjusted some of the original imagery heavily for the sake of this fic. It's still more or less my original concept that has been haunting me for a good couple months now, and I'm glad to have it written now.
> 
> Holidays are ending. Time to go back to Japan! See you all continuing into 2019!
> 
> Feel free to leave a comment below or hit me up on my [tumblr!](http://someobscurereference.tumblr.com/) I get a lot of FE14 meta and fic related asks there, so feel free to browse through my "asks" or "fe14" tag for some extra stuff from me and your fellow readers that you may not see over here. Or send in a question of your own if you had one! Thanks for reading!


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